Better support for clustered environments

[Van Stokes Jr]

We would like to see better support for clustered environments.

We run a cluster environment using VirtualBox and glusterFS. All VM's and their virtual disks are stored on mirrored glusterFS volumes via storage nodes (dedicated storage servers). We have several compute nodes (Linux x64 host servers) running the the guest VM's. All compute nodes share the same VirtualBox.xml (stored on a mirrored glusterFS volume) so that any guest VM can be serviced by any compute node. We use phpVirtualBox to manage our VM cluster.

This cluster configuration presents several problems:

1) Updates to guest VMs (i.e. to VirtualBox.xml via vboxmanage) on any server in the cluster is never propogated to the other servers in the cluster unless a complete restart occurrs;

2) Compute node B (or C, D, E, etc) does not know that Compute Node A is currently servicing (running) guest VM '1234'.

Proposed Enhancments:

1) A new file called '{compute node}.state.xml' (or any other name).

This file is created in the guest VM's home VirtualBox folder and updated to reflect the current state of the guest VM. The '{compute name}' is used in the filename to designate which compute node (host server) the state file is for. This file is updated accordingly by the compute node to provide read-only information via vboxmanage and web services.

VirtualBox.xml is modified to better separate configuration information versus 'current running state' information so that the 'current running state' information is by compute node. This will allow for 'teleporation' within a cluster. You cannot use teleportation in a cluster sharing the same VirtualBox.xml.

2) Updates to VirtualBox.xml are propogated to other compute nodes sharing the same VirtualBox.xml.

Perhaps add a new vboxmanag command called "refresh config". This command will cause VirtualBox to re-scan the VirtualBox.xml and update it's memory configuration. This command should also be available in web services.

[Van Stokes Jr]

Forum post here: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=52244